Re: <nettime> The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Graham Harwood <g.harwood@gold.ac.uk>]

Garnet, Tom and all

Thanks for that contribution - it unfolds maker from a north American 
perspective and would be happy to hear about the historical connections. 
I'm always in ore of how North Americans share - whatever you want to 
make fix - deconstruct their is always an enthusiastic North American on 
youtube.  Thanks also for Toms comments on class, squatting and free 
parties and sound systems. It has revived this conversation for me as I 
thought we would see the usual silence pregnant pause after the word 
class is mentioned. Without wanting to stray to far

"The maker movement is somewhat significant in that it highlights how 
alienated contemporary western culture has become from the manual craft 
of building your own objects, and how wholly absorbed it has been 
enveloped in consumer culture. The maker movement works counter this 
alienation"

I think Maker Magazine did little to address the implicit alienation 
involved in technical objects. In part because the genealogy of the 
alienation and technical objects problem reveals other politics. The 
implicit alienation involved in technology enslaving humans is a 
recurrent European theme in popular films “It is out there, it can’t be 
bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, it doesn't feel pity or 
remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop…”(1984, Terminator) It 
appears in popular science  Stephen Hawking “...automation of factories 
has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of 
artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep 
into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or 
supervisory roles remaining.” And appears in the weird and eerie 
machines of Boston Dynamics, a USA military funded robotics company, 
that has been working hard to propagandise an approach to robotics and 
marketing that encourages anthropomorphism in machines, that will 
eventually autonomously kill. This form of alienation finds its mirror 
in technology as slave, appendage, tool, agent of our will to order the 
material universe through an extension of skill, thought, sense.

An important and vital part of this alienation is the notion of the 
slave found everywhere in technical master slave systems. A Slave in 
Classical Greece times was seen as techne and the slave masters of old 
thought they could replace the rebellious black bodies through technical 
process.(introduction of steam engines in sugar plantations) Both 
technology as slave or enslaver place technology outside of the 
consideration of it being treated as essentially human. Both forms have 
been described as implicit or explicit alienation by Gilbert Simondon in 
On the mode of Technical Objects and Lewis Mumford in Pentagon of Power 
tried to address this issue around the middle of last century. In 
different ways they both thought that this alienation would allow 
powerful groups to use technical forms to construct different versions 
of societies of control. What I'm trying inarticulately to say is that 
the interconnections of slavery and technical objects  needs to be a 
theme of critical technical practice. Alienation can be sidestepped for 
now by considering technical objects as social cognition in the way that 
Hutchins see's it "Cognition in the Wild", or how we become 
collaborative with machines to make different organisms in a more then 
human world.

On another note - concerning consumerism. Gong farmers, Nightmen, 
Dustman, sewage workers and refuse(d) collectors have worked tirelessly 
in the shadows of history struggling to get rid of dirt, seamlessly 
removing it to where it offers to be less threatening, toxic and 
polluting or at least they remove it from the eyes who inhabit the 
idealised urban scape - this also includes those gadgets that are 
readily discarded. Contemporary capitalisms waste can be thought of as 
an intentional part of the productive cycle of consumerism. (See Brookes 
Stevens 1968 -> planned obsolescence) Consumerism itself of course is a 
stand in for a system that allows individual identity to be formed and 
reformed by the products consumed. Waste disposal is what, invisibility 
makes the modern possible while banal fecal taboo's aid such a process 
to create a phycology that keeps waste and those who work it in the 
shadows. This excreting down stream so to speak, makes visible a 
clearing, a modern hygiene, enabling a separation of the ordered city 
(the new gadgets that make me me today) from chaotic nature, human from 
their animal selves.

On a different note, I'm not sure what kind of penetration Rasberry Pi's 
made in north America but in my local area the Southend Linux Users 
Group ran Raspberry Jams which brought together critical makers, school 
age geeks, circuit board manufacturers. The gender and age mix was 
relatively good and they could have anything from 200 to 500 people in 
attendance - they were led by Derek Shaw (I can put you in touch if that 
useful) Another important seam was The Next Five Minutes events that 
took place in the Netherlands in the late 90's  I think that where I met 
Jaromil. Another interesting development is a Critical Maker book being 
put together by Loes Bogers among others at the The Institute of Network 
Culture which Geert Lovink manages. Another flavor of critical making 
was the recent departed Ilya Li in Tiawan who helped facilitate many 
networks and east west linkups.

hope not too far off topic

-- 
Mondays to Wednesdays
Dr Graham Harwood, Reader in Critical Technical Practice
Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies
Goldsmiths, University of London
Office: Media Research Building (MRB) 21


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